Thursday, June 25, 2009

My output has been sorely affected by the bugs on my laptop. Nasty ass malware infected my system (avast!antivirus bug, malware doctor, trojans and rootkits and bullshit, oh my!). It may have taken down many unfinished songs and unfinished writings with it. Which is almost like a genocide of my creative spirit. But it also leaves room for fresh starts...

To catch up, I've got a few older reviewers here, of two really good albums:

In addition, check out this great ongoing feature on the 10th anniversary of PopMatters in which we look back at the music of 1999. I've got four capsule reviews in there already published (on Trans Am, Nobakazu Takemura, Underworld, and Four Tet).

"It is very well established that as women have more opportunities, more education, as better medical care is available, as more family planning is available, fertility rates go down, abortion goes down, children are better cared for, women are healthier. Those things are known. Those are all things that are easily under social control and should not be controversial.

"I don't think there should be anything controversial about making sure that women have access to decent obstetric care. That alone would save hundreds of thousands of lives each year. If you want to do things to help women, there are very easy ways to do it. And it's not just true of women but also children. UNICEF also reports that, if my memory is correct, 15 million children die every year from mostly easily treatable diseases, things like a lack of drinkable water, or dehydration, or diarrhea, things that can be very easily treated, and treatable for pennies a day from the rich countries. So, if you're serious about saving lives, about saving children's lives, there are easy ways to do it.

"On the other hand, if you look at the same people who are most militant about saving the fetus, are they calling for an increase in foreign aid? Are they concerned that the United States has the most miserable and miserly foreign aid program of any developed country, by quite a large margin? The country has plenty of wealth, the means are easily there, (but) the social policy is being designed to enrich the wealthy even further and let the poor suffer, let the children starve, let the mothers die, and so on. That's an overwhelming problem.

"People who are willing to address those problems we can at least take seriously when they talk about values. You can listen to what they say about other things, like abortion, which is a hard question. But I don't think we should be interested in discussing it with people whose values are such that they don't care about the massive problem of killing and harming women and children that they could easily deal with and are doing nothing about. In fact, making it worse, not doing nothing about it, but making it worse."- Noam Chomsky, Lake of Fire